


vibrations

by owlinaminor



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: 5+1 Things, F/M, Fluff with a side of feelings, Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-16
Updated: 2017-08-16
Packaged: 2018-12-16 01:42:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11818554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: Lup is always the most comfortable in spaces she can fill, but there’s something different about filling space with Barry, about his voice and hers leaning into each other like consonant vibrations, like the mountains and the sky.(five times lup kisses barry, and one time he kisses her)





	vibrations

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes the character study you're working on gets you too sad, so you take a break to write soft kissing instead.
> 
> unbeta'd, because i'm living on the wild side until becky catches up with taz.

**1.**

This is a damn good party.

Lup has been to a lot of parties in her life – big parties, impromptu parties, topless parties, parties where everyone is under a charm enchantment and the floor is made of pillows – but she’s never been to a party quite like this.  Or perhaps she’s out of practice – it’s been ten years since her last party or party-adjacent experience, and time has warped her sense of the lit, the mediocre, and the weird.  But no, she decides after a moment of debate – this is a _special_ party.  It’s a party commemorating the Starblaster’s (and it’ crew’s) survival of ten full years, living and dying and fighting the darkness.

This is an occasion momentous enough that Cap’n’port finally gave into the Taacos’ wheedling _(please, just a little party, we won’t break anything, we_ deserve _this)_ and let them turn the deck of the ship into a dance floor fit to commit murder on.  (Not that Lup has committed murder on any dance floors.  In the past ten years.)  There’s a disco ball spinning from the rigging, a baseline pumping through the floor, a cooler on one side filled with a dangerously fruity substance Taako just invented.  _(I call it the Thirst,_ he said.  _Like the Hunger, only instead of swallowing your entire plane of existence, it swallows all your inhibitions._   He refuses to tell anyone what’s in it until the jug is empty.  Lup has never been more proud of him.)

They deserve this.  They deserve this one night – well, they deserve more than one night, honestly, but this isn’t a bad start.  Lup glances around at the crew: Magnus pumping his arms in the air in a dance move that somehow doubles as a core workout, Davenport doing something strange and arcane called the Cotton Eye Joe at the back, Taako and Merle competing for who can down a glass of Thirst faster, Barry spinning Lucretia around as she keeps a half-full cup aloft in the air.

Barry gets faster, when he’s drunk.  Like someone has pressed fast forward on an old recording, or flipped through a hundred pages of a book in ten seconds.  He steps back forth back forth, moves his arms up down up down, glasses abandoned on a side table somewhere and jeans hanging low on his hips.  He’s almost vibrating.

Back at the Academy, someone told Lup that Barry Bluejeans was the life of every party he attended.  She’d never quite been able to reconcile that phrase with the man himself – wide eyes behind thick glasses, soft around the middle, faded jeans he wears even to sleep – but now, she gets it.  It’s not that he’s a good dancer, or that he’s a crazy dancer.  It’s rather that his nervousness falls away like a coat in summer, leaving only this vibrating streak of joy.

The music changes, synth-laced beats fading into the croon of some heartbroken singer broadcasted over the Starblaster’s newly installed speaker system.

_Coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just fine –_

Lup doesn’t recognize the lyrics (save a vague sense of déjà vu, no doubt from previous parties where she’s head this song), but Barry does, if his shriek is anything to go by.

“Didn’t he make this playlist?” Magnus asks of nobody in particular.

He did, but Lup can’t answer – she’s too busy watching intently as Barry Bluejeans climbs onto a table and starts gyrating his entire body.  His eyes are closed, and he’s belting along to the lyrics as though he’s trying to become one with the chorus.  Somewhere in the back, Taako snaps, and the disco ball grows a spotlight, fixated directly on Barry’s ruddy face.

Lup cocks her head for a moment, then tilts her head back, downs her drink, and climbs up onto the table beside him.

Barry opens his eyes when Lup’s added weight makes the table shift, then grins when he sees her – a brilliant, unencumbered thing, like looking into direct sunlight.  He grabs her hands and pulls her into his orbit, into his vibration.

Elves don’t get drunk easily – it usually takes Lup at least ten shots before she’s feeing anything – but whatever Taako put in that cooler must be _good_ because Lup is feeling it now, the room going fuzzy around her and the earth’s movement slowing and Barry a kaleidoscope of motion.

Lup wonders if this is what normal people feel, when they get too close to the Light of Creation.  And then something shifts – one melody melts into another – and she’s kissing him.  Her hands on his face, her hips pushed against his, his lips opening to encompass her, slowing to match the rotation of the earth.

They’re standing on a table on a ship orbiting above the surface of a planet, but Lup has never felt more steady.

Barry is not going to remember this in the morning, but there will be a new line drawn in one of Lucretia’s notebooks, mapping a connection between Barry and Lup.  Vibrating and pulling closer.

 

**2.**

Their thirty-seventh cycle is on a world of mountains and lakes, all shimmering green and endless blue.  They recover the Light after a few weeks, following it easily to one open spot in an expansive city’s worth of forest, then split up to explore.

Barry takes a particular interest in the trees of this world – they’re like evergreens, only tall as giants, with leaves ranging from wispy little things soft as feathers to spikes as big as Lup’s arm.  Some of the thicker trees are capable of swallowing full families of deer, and some of the taller ones are, by Merle’s tree ring calculations, over two thousand years old.  Barry has twenty-something theories about nitrogen- and phosphorus-based equivalents to photosynthesis, and decides to set out on a canoe trip across a huge lake near the planet’s equator in order to take a bunch of samples.  Lup goes along because, well, where better to practice fireball casting than a large body of water.

Which brings them to here – a skinny wooden boat in the middle of a wide, still lake.  (They’d found it on the south bank, one of the many remnants of civilization they’ve come across on this world; Lup suspects an overdose of warfare, Barry thinks the trees ate all the people.)  The sky above is bluish-purple, the color of a sunset left unfinished, and the trees around the lake are reflected back by its surface.  From Lup’s perch in the back of the boat, they don’t look quite as big as giants – they’re almost like the trees she remembers from home, only darker, jagged at the top.

It’s quiet.  Almost entirely quiet, save for the rustling of the breeze and the _splish_ of the canoe paddles – in and out, in and out.  Lup tries to remember the last time she was somewhere this quiet.  When she and Taako were kids, maybe, and they slept outside between caravans, counting the stars to distract themselves from the night’s chill.  Lup shivers involuntarily at the memory.

It’s too quiet.  But there’s an easy solution: Lup leans forward, concentrates on the back of Barry’s head (covered by an enormous sunhat he had somehow constructed out of denim), and whispers,

“PENIS.”

Barry jumps like a spooked cat, nearly dropping his paddle.

“What was that?” he demands, spinning to face Lup.  His cheeks are entirely red – which can’t be sunburn, because, well, the hat.

Lup snickers at the sight.  “Haven’t you ever played the penis game?” she asks.

“The _what.”_

“The penis game.”

When Barry only continues to look at her, blue eyes narrowed, she explains, “You take turns yelling _penis_ at increasing volumes until one person chickens out.  Taako and I used to do it all the time when we were kids.”

Barry looks at Lup for another moment, his expression unreadable, then turns back around and resumes paddling.  Lup matches his rhythm for a couple of minutes, and is about to ask if he’d feel more comfortable playing the _vagina_ game instead when he says, very clearly,

“Penis.”

Lup feels a grin coming on.

“Penis!” she calls back, a little louder.

He responds, and soon the lake is echoing with their voices, interspersed with childish laughter.  Lup is always the most comfortable in spaces she can fill, but there’s something different about filling space with Barry, about his voice and hers leaning into each other like consonant vibrations, like the mountains and the sky.

And then the competition gets so loud, Lup has to add a little extra power to her vocal cords: she stands up in the boat and bellows, _“PENIS.”_ from the bottom of her lungs.

“Lup, wait,” Barry gasps, twisting to wave frantically at her, “Don’t stand up, you’re gonna tip –”

“PENIS,” Lup repeats, dropping her paddle and stepping over the boat in his direction.  “PENIS.”  Maneuvering around the supplies stowed in the middle.  “PENIS.”  Taking another step to lean right into Barry’s right ear.

“PENIS!”

Barry lurches to the left – and suddenly everything is in the water.  Their canoe has been transformed into an upside-down slab of wood.

“You are so lucky I know how to swim now,” Barry says, after spitting out a few gulps of lake water.

Lup casts levitate on the boat, sending it up and out of the lake along with at least one pack of supplies.  She debates casting it on herself, too, but the water is cool and refreshing around her like a full-body version of a nice cold beer, so she figures she can afford to stay a bit longer.

“All the equipment is wet, now,” Barry says.  “And all the food.”

“Sorry,” Lup tells him.

He paddles around to face her – his glasses are still on, miraculously, but the denim hat was thrown out of reach, and his reddish hair is sticking up like a porcupine with poor fashion sense.

“You’re not sorry.”

“Yeah,” she concedes.  “But I can make it up to you.”

Barry raises one waterlogged eyebrow.

And – well, nobody is going to see this, except the lake and the sky and the possibly sentient trees.  Lup thinks of voices leaning on each other, and a denim hat the color of bright blue eyes, and maybe she didn’t volunteer for this trip just to practice fire spells.

Maybe she came along to do _this._

She pushes herself forward and presses her lips to Barry’s.  He tastes of pine needles and sunshine, and it’s only seconds before he’s kissing back, his hand coming to the back of her neck and his mouth opening around hers, warm and easy as the current moving far beneath them.

“See?” Lup says, pulling back and casting another levitate spell, then grabbing the canoe on her way up.

“Yeah.”  Barry’s grinning, brilliant as the ripples of light on the lake.

(Lup is less afraid of the quiet, after that.)

 

**3.**

Humans sleep too much.

It’s cosmically unfair, really.  Their lives are so short – sixty years, eighty years maybe, over in two blinks of an eye – and yet they need to spend seven or eight hours out of every twenty-four lying down unconscious when they could be eating or loving or blowing shit up.  Maybe it’s _because_ they have so few hours actively alive that those hours are often so brightly lived, Lup postulates – but then, she has what Barry would call a very small sample size (him, Lucretia, Magnus), so it’s hard to come to any real conclusion.

Barry is a very small sample size, lying flat on his back, eyes closed, belly rising and falling like a gentle mountain.  He snores.  Almost inaudibly, but he snores.  And he sleeps with one arm outstretched – or at least, last night into this morning, he has slept with one arm outstretched – fingers laced tightly into Lup’s.

If Lucretia were here, perhaps she would sketch this picture.  _Sleeping nerd, pencil on paper, 3046._   If Taako were here, he would draw dicks all over Barry’s face.  Actually, if a Lup of thirty-odd cycles were here, she would do the same.  But now, she wishes she had Lucretia’s gift for art, or for poetry.  Even if she gave up on _Sleeping nerd, pencil on paper, 3046_ after five minutes, that would be five minutes she isn’t considering building a pocket dimension, just for him, just a place where he never has to frown again.

Actually – no.  Humans need sleep, but they don’t _need_ it.  They can survive with less of it.  She can check that with Merle later.

Now: Lup bends from lying on her side, one elbow propping up her head, to kiss the crook of Barry’s neck.  Then she moves down – kisses his collarbone, his chest.  He is so soft, so warm, like a beam of sunlight or an apple pie fresh from the oven.

She is kissing the spot just above his heart when he begins to stir.  Begins to look down at her, eyes half lidded, as though wondering if he’s still breathing.

She wonders if it would be selfish, to wish that she could be the first thing he sees upon waking every morning for the rest of his life.

“Hey,” he says, voice low.

She kisses the hollow of his belly button – slips in enough tongue to make him shriek.

“We should probably,” Barry says.  (She’s moving to the curve of his hip, just beneath the hem of his jeans.)  “Talk about this.”

“About what?”

He’s very pale, here, Lup observes.  Around the thigh area.  She can fix that.

“About – yesterday.  And last night.  And what to call this.”

Lup hears that melody in her mind again, as he speaks.  It’s in the mind of every person in this world, now.  And maybe most of the population of this world doesn’t know how that melody means _this,_ Lup drinking in Barry’s smile as though it’s the motor behind her heartbeat, but she knows.  He knows.

Barry is good at this – at words, meanings, definitions.  He never starts work on a problem unless he’s first outlined the denotation of every term, organized in pencil on a lined sheet of paper.  He never steps foot on a planet until he has decided what to call it.

He will want to call Lup his girlfriend.

She has never been anyone’s girlfriend before.  But she looks at him – his cheeks very red in the sunlight, his eyes half a universe, his smile pulling her, pulling her, like the rotation of the earth.

“Okay,” Lup says.

She pulls herself up, kisses his smile for half a heartbeat, and settles on her back beside him.

“Let’s talk.”

**4.**

Barry has been working on this potion for thirty-four hours.

Thirty-four hours, seventeen minutes, and twenty-two seconds, to be precise.  Lup knows this because she was looking at the clock when he announced it – _I think I’ve got a way to isolate the polychlorinated biphenyl in this soil,_ he’d said, pausing to grab a cup of coffee and a power bar on his route through the kitchen – and because she has looked at the clock many times since, with increasing frequency after he hit hour twenty-four.

Barry does this, sometimes.  He finds a question that he just _has_ to solve, as though the world must stop turning until he can discern the precise formula for some compound or the exact mechanics behind some piece of technology.  Lucretia is like this too, sometimes, locking herself in with a pile of notebooks until she’s recorded every detail of a mission.  And even Taako has done it a few times, trying to narrow down the most efficient transmutation for a certain element or the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Lup doesn’t know how they do it.  The only times she’s able to focus herself intently are when she knows exactly what she’s working toward – a bigger fireball, a weapon against the Hunger, an orgasm – and can work her way there in intervals.  She has to set herself small goals, individual rewards, break for a batch of scones after four hours and break for a quiche after ten.  But Barry just loses track of time, as though he’s stepped out of the prime material plane and into a pocket dimension where he doesn’t need to eat, or sleep, or even go to the bathroom for hours.

He’s not in a pocket dimension though, is the thing.  He’s still in the prime material plane.  Still very much human.

Lup puts down the book she’s reading – it lands with a satisfying _thump_ on the common room’s table.  (A shame nobody else is around to hear it.)  She heads for the kitchen, cranks up the magical stereo, and checks the fridge.  _Nice_ – they have almost everything.  And she can get Taako to transmute some lactose-free cheese, no problem.

Barry has been working on his potion for thirty-four hours, fifty-six minutes, and forty-nine seconds when Lup pushes the lab door open.

She takes a second to survey the scene: half-full beakers lined along the counters, beakers soaking with cleaning fluid in the sink, the chalkboard along the back wall covered in scratched-out formulas, and one intent nerd, lab coat swinging above his worn jeans and ratty sneakers, humming as he jots something down in a spiral notebook.

Lup tiptoes towards him – careful to maneuver around three trash cans and a barrel full of vaguely fluorescent moss – then bends down to kiss his neck.

Barry gasps, and Lup feels his heart speed up, vibrating through his sternum up to the arteries meeting just beneath his chin.  (Humans are so fragile, so easily shattered – perhaps that is why they work so hard.)

Lup kisses him again, harder this time and with a hint of teeth.  She grins against his neck when he exhales shakily.

“Babe,” she says.  “Do you know how long you’ve been in here?”

“Uh, I don’t – you know you can’t be in here without a lab coat and goggles, right?”  Barry puts his notebook down.  Lup bends to kiss him again, this time at the point where the strap of his goggles meets his ear, and he grips the counter as though fighting for purchase on the surface of the earth.

“Nearly thirty-five hours, babe,” Lup tells him.  “That’s too long.”

“Okay, but I’m almost there,” Barry protests.  “I nearly had it with this last trial, just a couple more and I’ll be there.  It’s just the color thing that’s getting me, I have to find the right indicator –”

Lup reaches for his hips and turns him gently, gently, like a parachute jumper returning to solid ground.  She pulls his goggles up to his forehead, leaving red marks around his eyes – now very wide and very blue, blinking up at her.

“Four doctorate degrees doesn’t make you qualified to skip meals,” Lup tells him.  “Now, come on.  I’m making mac and cheese.”

For a long moment, Barry just looks at her.  She slides her hand to his hips, rubs small circles through the lab coat.

“With lactose-free cheese?” he asks.

Lup grins.  “You know it.”

He’s got a bit of stubble just starting to poke through, reddish and fuzzy on his chin.  It’s not a bad look, Lup decides as she leans in to kiss him, soft and easy, her fingers tightening on his hips like a survival reflex.

Barry kisses back for a handful of seconds, warm and tasting faintly of old coffee, before he remembers his own rule against making out in the lab and leans back over the counter.

“You know that’s unsanitary,” he says.

“And you know you need to eat,” Lup retorts.  His stomach growls faintly, obediently proving her point.

Lup lets him go and turns toward the door.  “C’mon, babe, there’s just enough time left before it’s done for you to shower.  And you _need_ to shower – it smells like something died in here.”

“If I shower, will you come with me?” he replies.

Lup throws a smirk over her shoulder – _that’s_ more like it.

 

**5.**

Humans sleep too much.

It’s cosmically unfair, really – Lup has spent decades thinking she had time, she had time, she had so much _time_ , when she should have been savoring every moment, tying them together like a string of pearls she could tie into the pocket of her jeans.  Every minute in this world feels like a minute of borrowed time, every breath takes in slightly less air.

They came to this world, and they suffocated it.  Hundred-year-old wizards with their darkness and their light, transmuting whole civilizations into chessboards, into experiments, into toy soldiers.  In another version of this story, they would be the villains.

Lup has not felt like dancing for months now.

Humans sleep too much, even this particular human on the bed in front of her who fights his biology harder than most.  She used to hate it when he slipped away beside her – _what if he wakes up different in the morning_ – but in the last few cycles, she’s grown to find it endearing how soft he gets asleep.  How the lines on his forehead smooth, the fingers so often clenched splay out, like sunbeams reaching to embrace the world.

Now, she is thankful for his biology.  He won’t have a chance to tell her they were right enough, powerful enough, to play as gods.

The light coming through the ship windows is soft and golden.  It paints Barry’s face carefully, hugging the curves of his cheeks and the faint stubble beneath his chin.  He is snoring slightly – in and out, in and out – his chest is rising and falling with the vibrations.

Lup memorizes his face – _just in case_ – then leans down and presses a kiss to his forehead, soft as the sunlight before her.

She leaves a note on the kitchen table: _Back soon._

 

 

 

**& 1.**

It’s strange, having a body again.

Lup focuses on each piece in turn – first her toes, then her heels, ankles, calves – the way her aunt once suggested when she was four years old and complained of being unable to sleep.  She feels oddly like sleeping, now.  Elves don’t need to sleep but every piece of her feels so heavy, dragged down by gravity and mortality.  She feels so heavy, yet at the same time she has never been more awake.

Heartbeat.  She has a heartbeat.  She has lungs kidneys nervous system.  One hand goes to her chest almost of its own accord and she feels smooth skin and faint vibrations.  She closes her eyes and focuses again on her feet – the earth is moving beneath her.

She opens her eyes.  And focuses two paces in front of her on Barry.  He’s standing there, one arm holding a sundress and underwear – _it’s been ten years since she’s worn underwear_ – and watching her as though she is the birth of the universe.  He looks different, now that she is looking at him with two eyes – _light fills the back of the eye retina receives the image cornea focuses the lens optic nerve leads back to the brain_ – as though a switch has been flicked, returning the color to his hair, the shape to his cheeks.

_She’d forgotten how blue his eyes are._

Lup takes one step forward.  Barry takes a step to meet her.  He reaches one hand up then stops, as though approaching a painting in a museum.

“Come on, babe,” she says.  Her voice is quiet, scratchy, an out of tune violin.  “I’m not gonna break.”

He smiles, at that – bright and watery, a long tone on an old piano.  She looks closer and realizes he’s crying – tear tracks on his cheeks sparkling faintly in the lamplight – then reaches up one hand to touch.  Cheeks damp as morning dew, faint stubble on his chin.

Her palm slips down to linger on his pulse point.  His heart is beating so fast – she’d laugh at him if her heart wasn’t racing to match, two melodies arching together.

He takes her hand in his, then leans in slowly, so slowly, and kisses her: first the corner of her mouth, next her pulse point, then just above her eye.  His lips are feather-light and gentle as a breeze over still water, as the first light of dawn.

And then he pulls back and looks at her, looks at her, looks at her.  His eyes are so very blue.

“What was that?” she asks.

There’s a faint scattering of red on his cheeks – _she’s missed that color_ – as he answers, “It was like… calibrating.  When you get a new machine, and you need to test out the full range of its movement before you can start using it.  I don’t know.”

Lup is grinning – she wonders if the shape of her smile is the same as it was ten years ago, or if she’ll need to practice.

“Do you think I’m a machine, Barry Bluejeans?”

“No,” he answers, honest as the sun.  “I think you’re beautiful.  And I love you.  And I’m so fucking glad you’re back.”

There are all things she already knows, but the articulation is more than reason enough for her to pull him close and link her arms around him – holding steady, holding steady, not letting go.

**Author's Note:**

> barry's "calibration" in that last scene is inspired by [the kiss scene in amelie](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQutB3mYc84).
> 
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